Bill VanPatten is Professor of Spanish and Second Language Acquisition at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has held a variety of administrative positions and is currently the Director of Spanish Basic Language. He received his Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1983. His areas of research are input and input processing in second language acquisition and the acquisition of Spanish syntax and morphology. He has published widely in the fields of second language acquisition and second language teaching and is a frequent conference speaker and presenter. He is the lead author of Vistazos (2002, McGraw-Hill) and ¿Sabías que... ? (2000, McGraw-Hill). He is also the lead author and designer of Destinos, a television series for PBS, in the co-author with James F. Lee of Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen (1995, McGraw-Hill), and is the author of Input Processing and Grammar Instruction: Theory and Research (1996, Ablex). In addition to his involvement in a variety of research projects, Dr. VanPatten is currently working on a book called Theories in Second Language Acquisition.

Martha Alford Marks received her Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from Northwestern University in 1978. She subsequently served on the faculties of Kalamazoo College and Northwestern University, where she coordinated the first- and second-year Spanish programs, supervised teaching assistants, appeared consistently on the Faculty Honor Roll, and won an Outstanding Teaching Award. Nationally known for her work as an ACTFL Oral Proficiency tester and trainer, Dr. Marks is also the co-author of several other McGraw-Hill Spanish textbooks for the college level, including ¿Qué tal? and Al corriente.

Richard V. Teschner has been a professor of Language and Linguistics at the University of Texas-El Paso since 1976. His 1972 Ph.D. in Spanish Linguistics is from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published over 50 articles and a dozen monographs, most recently CUBRE: Curso breve de gramática española (McGraw-Hill College Custom) and El triple diccionario de la lengua española (TRIDIC), a CD-ROM (Star-Byte, Inc.). In 1988 he was President of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese and the Linguistic Association of the Southwest.